Where the Niles converge

This is the basic text of this morning's Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2's Chris Evans Show. Search blog for 'Sudan' to read posts.

I guess most of us have at some time in our life entertained some romantic ideas about exotic places we dream of visiting one day. I remember reading Antony and Cleopatra – Shakespeare, not the Carry On version – when I was at school in Liverpool and imagining the River Nile. Plagued with queen-biting asps, obviously.

Well, a few weeks ago I actually went to the Nile. In fact, I went to both Niles: the Blue and the White. We were visiting Bradford's link diocese in Sudan and every day drove over the bridge in Khartoum where the two rivers converge before heading north to Egypt and so on. I'm not colour-blind, but I tell you: both the Blue and the White Niles look brown to me.

Life is tough for many of the people we were visiting there in Sudan. Outsiders and foreigners are being told to leave, and southerners are being sent… er… south. Now, the reasons for all this are complicated and the politics somewhat controversial; but, what we saw was the human cost of other people's privilege. Put simply, when life gets tough between different peoples, the easiest thing to do is separate… grow apart deliberately.

But, the solving of one problem doesn't bring peace – it simply creates more problems and causes lots of misery for the ordinary people who have to pay the price of powerful people's greed and vanity. But, we in Bradford are bound up with our friends in Sudan and, whatever happens, we will stick by them.

An hour after we left our guesthouse for the airport at one in the morning, the house was raided, guests taken in for questioning, and the place confiscated by the security services. It might be a world away from Bradford and the Yorkshire Dales, but, like the Blue and the White Niles, we have converged and cannot be separated as we travel into the future together.

Disappointingly, I saw no queen-biting asps.

 

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The end of the world

Here is my script from this morning’s Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. I met Michael Buble in the studio – which was nice – and then did my stuff as follows. But, I had to drop the second line of the song quote, so will add it at the end!

I’ve been on the road recently and you know what it’s like when you spend hours on trains – you can only read so much and then your mind begins to wander. Randomly sometimes. Well, I was coming back from Germany last Sunday and was reading a pile of stuff, all of which sort of suggested that the world was about to end. And then, somewhere in the murky depths of my memory, the line of a song poked up:

The world won’t end in darkness, it’ll end in family fun…*

It was the Beautiful South some years ago in a snarly little song called ‘One God’. But, you can understand the sentiment – the world’s turned plastic!

At some point every generation thinks it might be the last. Relatively minor issues take on ultimate importance and we can’t conceive of life continuing differently. Well, maybe it’s time for a bit of perspective. For example, when I was younger, and getting very excited about some issues, I learned to ask myself this question: in the context of the entire history of the entire universe, does this matter? Clearly, not everything did. When I was a vicar in Leicestershire I used to baptise in a Norman font – which had been used for a thousand years – and we would drink Communion wine from a chalice that had been used for nearly 500 years. Through wars and Reformation and disasters and all the stuff of the world and so on.

And guess what? Life carried on.

I am in London because the General Synod votes today on whether or not to allow women to be bishops. Some are saying that it will be a disaster if we do… and a disaster if we don’t. But, whichever way it goes, it won’t be the end of the world – whatever people say as they raise the emotional stakes. Wednesday will surely come; the sun will rise; we will still be here; life will carry on; and, hopefully, one day, the Beautiful South will cheer up and re-form to prove it.

[*"The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun / with Coca Cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun."]

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Leveson and Jesus: a popular perspective?

Not much time for blogging during a full London week. The General Synod kept me occupied during the day, other meetings (usually over a meal) in the evenings. The one morning I thought I could get some space I discovered I had agreed a breakfast meeting.

Leaving aside the fact that some media reporting of the women bishops business was bizarre (making the point that the Synod had ‘postponed’ making a decision until July – implying that the Synod was indecisive, procrastinating and deliberately spineless – when it was stated time and again in speech after speech that this debate would simply advise the House of Bishops prior to the bringing of the main debate in July), there wasn’t a huge amount to stimulate the imagination or fire the journalist’s critical faculties. We are against assisted dying, concerned about planned reform of he House of Lords, for the NHS and conflicted over fee levels for weddings and funerals – none of which evidences a shocking volte face.

So, the two things that are swimming around my own imagination as I ride the train back up north are tangential to the Synod’s preoccupations, but pertinent to what is going on elsewhere in the wider world.

First, reading coverage of Times editor James Harding‘s evidence at his second appearance before the Leveson Inquiry recalled to mind a conversation I had with a journalist recently. Discussing the impact of the phone hacking scandal on the nature and quality of journalism in the UK, the journalist expressed huge relief that at last the editors are in the firing line, unable to hide behind the frontline reporters. We have had a generation of newspaper editors demanding more and more – clearly sometimes exploiting both unjustifiably intrusive and actually criminal means of getting a story – from journalists who owed their jobs and future career to these tyrants. But, now it is the ‘generals’ in the dock and not just the troops in the trenches.

I hadn’t really thought about it in these terms – that many frontline reporters would be glad to see the exposure before Leveson of practices that are immoral and indefensible and that bring their profession into disrepute. The hope, as expressed to me, was that good, committed, intelligent and moral journalists would in future be able to work better and less fearfully for editors who now know they are likely to be held accountable. It might actually make journalism a better job and enable journalists to do better journalism.

The second thing on my mind comes from somewhere completely different, but involves another recent conversation. I was walking back from the BBC (where I had just done Pause for Thought on the excellent and never boring Chris Evans Show) to Church House, Westminster, and thinking about the Church’s apparent discomfort with popular culture (“We are more Radio 4 than Radio 2, bishop…”).

It occurred to me that Jesus went straight for popular culture in the villages and towns of Galilee. So, what do I think about the recently publicised ‘search for Jesus’, as in Andrew Lloyd-Webber‘s hunt for a singer to lead a stadium tour of Jesus Christ Superstar?

This has been called ‘tacky’ by some and ‘inappropriate’ by others. Inevitably it has led to screams of protest by the usual suspects (who have a loud voice, but little credibility) for whom any reference to Jesus has to be holy and disincarnate. But, I think the whole thing is pregnant with possibility.

Jesus used story and image to get into people’s imagination and tease them with a vision of how things could be in his ‘kingdom’. Like what the Germans call an ear-worm (Ohrwurm), these stories work their way into our head, re-shaping the lens behind our eyes through which we see God, the world and us. Far stronger than issuing statements with which we either agree or disagree.

In fact, the Archbishop of Canterbury picked up on a similar notion in a speech last night in London when he called for both the Church and the City to recover a moral imagination as we strive to reconnect finance and business with the moral ends to which they are the means (the common good). Imagination is not fantasy – imagination involves the power to conceive of something that isn’t yet apparent, but which might be gradually shaped.

Anyway, the ‘search for Jesus’, rather than being tacky or inappropriate, raises all sorts of really interesting questions. For example, the point of the gospels is that the reader is supposed to be shocked and surprised by (a) who Jesus is – and isn’t, and (b) who it was who received – or couldn’t receive – his invitation to look and see and think and live differently – discovering that grace is about God’s generosity and not our merit. So:

• what sort of Jesus will be sought for this show?
• will he be like the Mark Wallinger statue on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, simply human and vulnerable to what the world can throw at him, or a macho man? A wimp in a white nightie or an insensitive male chauvinist? A political revolutionary or a hapless victim?
• how do you portray the sheer charisma that gets a bizarre collection of twelve people (with loads of other followers) to live a dream followed by a nightmare followed by a fraught life of new living that leads them all to an early death… and to change the world for ever?

I am intrigued to see how we make the connection between the stage Jesus of the musical and the one we read about in the gospels and experience in our life and worship. After all, ‘popular culture’ involves ‘people where they are’. Call me common, but I am curious about what this latest search for a star might hold in terms of potential for conversation, debate, imagination, questioning and exploration – all in a medium that will engage more people than sit in all our churches put together each week.

En route we might even take a sideways look at how Jesus has been portrayed in film and theatre: Pasolini’s The Gospel of St Matthew, Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (which, as the title suggests, is primarily about Brian and not Jesus…), Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ.

Count me in. My imagination has been awoken.

 

Christmas eaves(dropping)

One of the challenges of Christmas is to say something sensible and enlightening that doesn’t descend into unworldly piety or sentimental wishful thinking. After all, we are celebrating Christmas while the little town of Bethlehem is surrounded by a dirty great wall, a bombing in Syria elicits the hurt response from a government minister (who clearly doesn’t ‘do’ irony) that “we wouldn’t hurt our own people”, Baghdad explodes in fear, Egypt ferments, parts of Africa starve, global financial systems totter, and the poorest people in Britain are about to enter a year of fear. It almost seems indecent to light up a tree and sing about ‘peace on earth’.

So, why do we?

In this last week – my first Christmas in Bradford – I was asked to say something at the City Carol Service attended by hundreds of people at Bradford Cathedral. It is pointless hoping that the service will speak for itself as the language both of carols and readings seems quite alien to the regular discourse of most people. So, I tried to pull the ‘now’ into the big picture of God’s presence in the world. Basically, Christmas is about the good news that God has not waited for us to climb our way out of the mess of life towards his unsullied glory… where we might find escape, relief or reward; rather, Christmas should shock us with the almost insane news that God has chosen to come among us, as one of us, thereby whispering into the business of human life that God is on our side – he is for us as well as with us.

I have no idea if this made any sense to the ‘outsiders’ who are unfamiliar with ‘church’ or the language of God. But, I hope it offered a different way of looking at Christmas: that we are not to seek God ‘out there’, keeping himself pure and unaffected by the dirt of the real world, but opting into this world as it is in order to offer newness and hope.

God, it seems, is less worried about his own purity than we often are. Rather than fear contamination, he quietly goes about contaminating the world with love.

Anyway, having done Pause for Thought on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2 on Thursday morning, I came back to Bradford in time to speak at the Carol Service for Bradford City Football Club at the Cathedral. Again the challenge was how to hold the attention and say something comprehensible about Christmas. On the radio earlier I had begun by noting that 22 December was the first step towards summer:

What a relief. Yesterday was the shortest day… so, it’s all up hill to summer from today. Isn’t that brilliant? The days are getting longer, the nights shorter – the darkness lighter and the light brighter. Come on, show a little optimism!

But, before we get too happy, we’ve got to get through Christmas first.

I wanted to find a story that illustrated what Christmas was about and remembered the following story – which I repeated at the Cathedral in the evening:

A little lad was getting worried. He desperately wanted a new bike for Christmas, so he decided to pray about it and wrote his letter to God. “Dear God, I’ve been a really good boy all year and think I deserve the new bike.” Then he thought about it, scrubbed it it and wrote: “Dear God, I’ve not been perfect, but I’ve tried hard and not been too bad. Please can I have the bike?” But he realised this was pushing it. So, he decided to go for a short walk while he thought about it. As he went round the corner of his road he saw a crib scene in a neighbour’s garden. He nipped through the gate, knocked over Joseph, grabbed Mary and stuck him under his coat. When he got home he wrote: “OK, if you wanna see your mother again, gimme the bike!”

And the simple point?

We sometimes think that we can bargain with God. Or that we can earn his favour. Or, even, that we can chalk up credits which he might then reward with good fortune. But, Christmas amounts to a massive rejection of all this. Christmas is about God opting into the mess of the world and neither exempting himself from it, nor waiting until we got the formula right before coming to us. In other words, it isn’t about us coming to him, but, rather, him coming to us.

It’s gift. That’s the surprise. That’s the deal. And that’s why I can wish you a happy Christmas.

Now, I’m not arguing that this is the deepest thought about Christmas – or the best way of telling it – but it does represent one attempt to speak simply, clearly and in language that can be understood by people not terribly familiar with Christian language or concepts. So, in the evening at the football club gig I tried to set the reading from John 1:1-14 in a comprehensible context before reading it. The short address (once I’d recalled Bradford City beating Liverpool on 14 May 2000 – not that it still hurts, you understand) invited us to lift our eyes up from the immediacy of the ‘now’ and the ‘me’ and the ‘my life’ to the cosmic, the God who creates and loves and sustains the universe. Having been grasped by the bigness of this (which is rooted in the human memory), we can then begin to understand the shocking enormity of God coming among us as one of us in a way that we can immediately understand and recognise. (I used easier language on the night…)

Christmas is God’s invitation to us to see where the ‘me’ and the ‘now’ fits into the great sweep of God’s history… and to be caught up in the wonder of being loved infinitely.

Perhaps the obvious words to focus on this Christmas will be the plea of the angels: “Don’t be afraid…” There is plenty to be afraid of in the year to come – just witness the impact already of job losses, housing support reductions (and the numbers of families that will be forced out of their homes, and communities that will be split up), hopelessness. Am I being trendy leftie here? Well, stop reading the blog and go into your city or town and ask homeless people why they are there. Investigate the number of floating shelters, church initiatives to feed, clothe and care for the casualties of our society.

It should come as no surprise that many Christian churches are providing so much costly and imaginative care for the most vulnerable. They will hold together the celebration that re-tells the story of God among us. They have been captured by a God who gets down and dirty in the midst of the real world. They are free to celebrate this way because their eyes have been lifted in order to see the ‘now’ in the context of eternity. And it is rooted in hope.

At Bradford Cathedral on Christmas morning we will recognise that we are a bunch of mortal and messy people who have simply been caught up by a vision and experience of God’s committed love. And it will be a celebration that commits us to living differently in today’s world – because of Jesus. As the great Bruce Cockburn put it:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river / driving the ripples on for ever / redemption rips through the surface of time / in the cry of a tiny babe.

Happy Christmas.

 

Heroes

One of the benefits of not living in London is that traveling to London allows time to read. My Inbox is empty, my desk is clear, correspondence is all done and I am ready for Christmas. And now the’s just catch-up to play with the books, papers, articles and briefings that haven’t quite found their way to the top of the pile.
 
So, coming down to London (I’m doing Pause for Thought on the BBC Radio 2 Chris Evans Show and then meetings tomorrow before getting back to speak at the Bradford City FC Carol Service at Bradford Cathedral in the evening) got me reading a pile of papers. All very important and worthy stuff and I feel better for having read it all. But, I got to my hotel and stuck the telly on… and that’s where the perspective changed.
 
I don’t usually watch awards shows, but this one captured me. I switched straight in to ITV’s A Night of Heroes: The Military Awards 2011 and listened to the story of a reservist paramedic who saved the life of a soldier in Afghanistan who had been shot in the head by a Taleban sniper. This was followed by four seriously injured soldiers who raised funds for charity by walking unaided to the North Pole (with Prince Harry).
 
I have to admit to a deep unease with the way in which the word ‘heroes’ is being used in relation to our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. From the safety of comfortable England I wouldn’t be so insensitive as to question the language used to draw attention to the people who don’t have the luxury of sitting in an armchair and doing semantic criticism. But, watching this awards ceremony makes it clearer than ever that people are not heroes for simply being in a place of conflict – that’s what they signed up for. Heroism comes in when people, with disregard to their own survival, put their life on the line to save someone else. To do this when people are shooting at you is one thing – you can hear from the stories how the adrenalin cuts in and you do something extraordinary. But, to do it again and again – conscious of the real fear and the potential cost – that is heroism.
 
These stories are astonishing. Seeing the human emotion in relationships forged by shocking violence is powerful.
 
But, the contrasts are also there to be seen on the screen. The audience includes glamorous telly stars and footballers (OK, I spotted Frank Lampard, Jeremy Clarkson and some dancer from Strictly Come Dancing)… but I just wonder how the pay of these extraordinary soldiers and medics compares with the pay of the media stars.
 
I’m not being bitchy. I just wonder what it says about our values and how we reward those who do the ‘harder’ job. Silly question, I know. But, it seems wrong that soldiers who have given life and limb at the command of politicians have to rely on charities to support them when they return to what we loosely call ‘civilisation’.
 
For the first time I feel we are watching real heroes… without having to quibble with the wording. These stories put the trivia of most of our superficial culture into perspective. (And I still hope the Military Wives get the number one spot at Christmas.)

 

Military Wives

There I was, all set up to talk about football and the Brontës, then I find the studio full of women singing. And aren’t they brilliant?
 
On this morning’s BBC Radio 2 Chris Evans Show Gareth Malone brought 20 of the 100 Military Wives choir (whose single Wherever You Are must surely go to number one for Christmas) to sing. There was a great atmosphere in the studio, but my Pause for Thought was in danger of missing the mood as well as the mark. So, I tried to bring the ‘choir experience’ into the script – before saying something about the honesty of genuine prayer.
 

The starting point was last Sunday’s dual experience of Haworth and Anfield:

Last weekend I had a bumper culture experience. On the Sunday morning I did a baptism and confirmation service in Haworth – the church where the Brontë sisters wrote their moody books. It was a good gig (as they say) in which several adults took up their responsibilities in the Christian Church. (I was back in Haworth the next day and it was freezing. I’d have called ‘Wuthering Heights’ ‘Brass Monkeys’…)

 

That afternoon I went with friends to Anfield to watch the Liverpool vs Manchester City game – the first time I’ve been back to Anfield for over twenty years. It was amazing. OK, the result wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, but the atmosphere – and Liverpool’s performance – were just fantastic.

 

And what was it that linked the two events – Haworth and Anfield (and singing in a big choir)? Well, it was something to do with a shared experience, a sense of awe, and very vocal expression of support. OK, 50,000 screaming footie fans make a different noise to 100 worshipping Christians – and they use different language sometimes, too(!). But, they both involve being caught up in something that’s bigger than ‘just me’.

 
(And this is where the collective experience of singing in a choir comes in. For most of the Military Wives there had been little or no previous experience of singing collectively. Every child everywhere should get the opportunity to experience learning a musical instrument and playing in an orchestra or singing in a choir.) 

One of the things I do every morning is read poetry that was written nearly three thousand years ago. I’m not a freak, but the Psalms mix up the cries of individuals with corporate songs of praise, lament, hope, fear, shame, joy… and just about every other human emotion. With no holds barred, the poets shout at God, complain about their lot in life, curse their enemies, question everything about why the world is the way it is, and yet usually hold onto the fact that God holds on to them. It’s wonderful and edgy stuff – and often reminds me that we are free to tell God the unvarnished truth about how and what we feel.
 
OK, Liverpool didn’t quite respond to my vocal urgings to put the ball in the net more often. But, that’s OK. Cos our prayers in the morning in Haworth weren’t about forcing a result; it was enough just to tell God the truth. And then move on.

 

I guess this is particularly pertinent – in an unplanned way – to the experience of the military wives in the studio this morning. Being separated for months on end from your husband or partner who is serving in dangerous territory in Afghanistan must from time to time evoke fear, loneliness, frustration and anger. Yet many people think that prayer is something pious – telling a rather disconnected God what he wants to hear… whereas, in fact, prayer is supposed to be the free, uninhibited and honest expression of real emotion and reflection to a God who understands… because he has been here. (Which, of course, is what Christmas is all about.)
 
I hope Chris Evans’ promotion of the Military Wives’ single will be enough to get it to number one for Christmas. It would be a great achievement. Especially as it involves ordinary people (not stardom-seekers) doing something as ordinary as singing together and creating something that is greater than the mere sum of its parts. 
 

 
 

 

 

 

 

I can’t dance

If you have a problem, why broadcast it to over ten million people? Good question.

I was back in the Chris Evans studio at BBC Radio 2 to do Pause for Thought this morning after a six month break while I settled in to Bradford. I’ve missed it – not because I’m a groupie, but because (a) it is unfailingly enjoyable and (b) it’s an interesting challenge to write and deliver scripts that work in that environment. Chris and his team were very friendly and welcoming despite the pressures of running an auction for Children in Need.

In this morning’s script I wanted to connect to today’s ‘Dine and Disco’ theme. Basically, I can do the ‘dine’ bit, but the ‘disco’ gives me the wobblies. Some people can dance, some can’t. I try, but I’m hopeless. Unfortunately, at the end of the slot Chris asked me to show him how I dance. He stopped me pretty quickly. Now he knows… (Radio is always better than telly for activities such as this.)

I referred back to the two gigs I got to last week: Imelda May at York and Jools Holland in Bradford. Both were fantastic, but you can’t sit still to either of them. Rockabilly, rhythm and blues, boogie woogie – even I had to get up and … er … dance … sort of. Fortunately, it was dark…

But, one of my favourite Imelda May songs ( which she did in York) is Proud and Humble. I think it’s really a prayer in which, with her extraordinary voice and cracking band, she wrestles with the attempt to live right while also trying to make life happen for herself. Addressing herself to God, she recognises where she fouls it all up, but pleads that at least she’s trying to get the most out of the life God has given her in the world which he created and loves.

And my point in this morning’s script is that I think this hits the button. We all need to own up to our failures, but not fail to celebrate the good stuff. We need both.

I think this is why the two gigs last weekend were full of joy. (I tried to find a less cheesy word than joy, but I couldn’t.) Even songs about loss and longing made the audiences dance – perhaps because somewhere in us there is a deep recognition that, as Bruce Cockburn once sang, ‘joy will find a way’. It comes when we know we’ve got nothing to fear – because the God who made us still knows us, beckons us, loves us, still holds open the possibility of a new start.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: music hits the soul and demands a response. I concluded my script with the following profound observation: Several thousand years ago a Psalmist wrote: “You turned my grieving into dancing.” Many of us know the feeling. Even though, I fear, my dancing would have made him grieve.

And that’s when Chris asked me to demonstrate. And then played Genesis’ I can’t dance. Very funny. And very accurate. How sad is that?

(Chris also clearly knows Bradford and bigged it up. Good to hear such positive stuff about the place.)

 

Writing for radio

During an address to nearly 500 people a couple of weeks ago I spoke about curiosity as a key to the Kingdom of God. What I meant by this is that Christian discipleship (it seems to me) has to be driven by curiosity about Jesus and where he might be leading us. There are lots of reasons why I think this, but they are not the point of this post.

As an example of this I used the challenge of writing and presenting scripts on the radio, making particular reference to the stuff I have done on BBC Radio 2 for more than a decade and now, particularly, on the Chris Evans Show. Before giving this address (which is why this example came to mind during it) someone asked how you find something useful to say in the ‘fluff of the programme’. So, when I referred to it I described it something like this:

You have to grab the attention of the potential listeners ( so they don’t go to the loo or put the kettle on), tease their imagination with story or image, say something, then give a pay off back into the ‘fluff’.

You get around 320 words to do it with.

The further challenge is that you have no idea if or how Chris will pick up on what you have said or the basic theme. Of course, there is no reason why he should pick up on it at all. But, the great thing about doing his show is that Chris is bright, interested, creative and excellent at engaging. When writing a script, you have to be conscious of stimulating the curiosity or imagination of the host and his team as well as the audience. It means speaking a language that is interesting and comprehensible to this diverse range of humanity.

And that’s why it is good to do. It is also excellent discipline for people like me who can talk for England, preach for hours, and range wildly from subject to subject.

It is also why I like Twitter and text messaging. These force you to be concise, to express an idea with very few words, to communicate effectively in brief. It demands the skill that is exemplified by comedian Milton Jones in his wonderful new book of ‘10 Second Sermons‘.

In a former life I used to encourage preachers to write a radio script of 400 words. I remember one person complaining that you can’t actually say something in such a short space. I responded that if you can’t say something in brief, you don’t know what you are trying to say… and you shouldn’t dare to say it for 20-30 minutes. I still think that.

The enjoyable thing about doing the stuff with Chris Evans is that he will often respond in ways you didn’t expect. Always interesting, sometimes challenging, never boring. And always a privilege not to be taken for granted.

Now I’m off to a communications conference…

 

Hockney’s bigger trees

Last Friday (1 April) my election as the tenth Bishop of Bradford was confirmed in a (mostly legal) ceremony at York Minster. Having a bit of time to kill before the service and legal ceremony, we went to have a look at the David Hockney exhibition in the City Art Gallery.

You go in through the front doors (not surprisingly) and ahead of you is a large room with a fifty-panel painting mounted on one wall: Bigger Trees Near Warter. On the facing wall there are explanations of process and there are computer displays explaining how and why Hockney set about this task in the first place.

What is interesting about the enormous painting is that it depicts an ordinary scene on the bend of a road near some buildings in North Yorkshire. It is the sort of place I have driven through many times and not noticed. Whereas I see a bit of countryside that has to be driven through if I am to get from where I was to where I want to be, Hockney sees a scene that captures the nature or spirit of a particular environment. I see ‘shallow’ and functionally; Hockney sees ‘deep’ and artistically. This might be because he is looking for somewhere to paint and I am keeping my eyes on the bendy, narrow roads – but you get my point.

I was musing on this while looking at the painting in the art gallery. Sometimes what we are looking for determines (or, at the very least, influences) what we see or how we look. And the gift of the artist is to invite us to look differently and see places (or things) differently. The artist asks us to look through a different lens and risk the potential for changing our perspective, having seen the object differently. It is what the Bible calls ‘repentance’ – changing how we look in order to change the way we see in order to change the way we think in order to change the way we live.

My wife remarked that Hockney “takes the ordinary, sees it differently, and makes it monumental”.

The second thing that struck me about Hockney’s work was an easily-missed comment on one of the explanatory panels in the gallery. His method involves observing, then painting very quickly. When you are doing this with fifty panels it is possible to end up with several large, wet panels at one time. So, he and his assistant had to modify their vehicle and construct a frame in the back so that these panels could be transported in whatever condition and without damage or compromise. Questioned about the characteristic spontaneity of his painting method, Hockey replied: “You’ve really got to prepare if you’re going to be spontaneous.”

It’s one of those annoying things that the people who make life look easy are those who have dug deep foundations and prepared well. Preparation is everything. The radio and TV presenter Chris Evans describes in It’s Not What You Think, the excellent first part of his two-volume autobiography, how his radio programmes are meticulously prepared for using pie charts. He only manages to get the effect of spontaneity because the whole thing is broken down into smaller units and is thoroughly prepared. It is impressive to see it in action.

Spontaneity is sometimes used as an excuse for laziness. A politician might be tempted to ‘wing it’ – or (he says…) a preacher to ruminate from the wells of experience, but we usually get found out. We become repetitive, uninspiring or embarrassed when questioned. Preparing for a radio documentary interview a month or so ago (for Bob Dylan’s 70^th birthday on BBC Radio 4 – going out in May), I checked basic facts, read lyrics and even bought three CDs I had last owned on tape. The interviewer turned up in my office the next morning with books, CDs and other resources and was surprised to find I didn’t need them – I had thoroughly prepared and knew what I was talking about (or limited what we did talk about to what I knew…). He kept remarking on it – much to my surprise as I couldn’t imagine doing the interview without having done my own research.

OK, I’ve winged it with the best and the rest of them. I’ve occasionally got away with murder and also know what it feels like to be found out – faced in front of a camera or microphone with a question for which I was not prepared. I’ve also been arrogant enough to think people would be interested in my unique perspective, only to find from their body language that I was mistaken.

As Tony Blair might have said (but didn’t): ‘Preparation, preparation, preparation’.

 

 

A time for time

Chris Evans spotted that I had written this morning’s Pause for Thought for his show while on a train to Bradford yesterday. I was up there for meetings and hadn’t had time the day before to do the script. So, it was fitted in on the train journey between reading a book manuscript for which I am to write a foreword and reading papers for the meetings ahead.

It’s not always straightforward knowing what theme to pick for these thought pieces. I didn’t know who the special guest on the show was going to be and the heavy themes had already been addressed by other contributors. So, having received a text from my anxious daughter last week asking me when the clocks change (and is it backwards or forwards?), I thought I’d say something brief about ‘time’. I also managed to quote three people: anon, Albert Einstein and African friends:

Someone once said that you can’t change the past, but you can waste the present by worrying about the future. The great Albert Einstein teasingly (but not very illuminatingly) stated that ‘the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once’. My African friends laughingly say that in the West we have watches and clocks, but in Africa they have time.

My point was that time is all we have – it’s precious. As I put it succinctly (we only have 330 words):

I have no idea how much longer I have to live: I might still be going strong at 90… or I might not. I have no idea. But, whenever it happens I want to know that I did my best to use time to the full. Which isn’t a miserable thought about packing life with serious stuff; it’s also about living and laughing and working and playing.

Now, that could be misunderstood. For most of the world’s population life is not very funny, but is a struggle to stay alive. So, am I just being frivolous, over-comfortable and inappropriately hedonistic? Well, this is how I concluded the piece:

We’re heading towards Easter and we will be reminded that Jesus only had around three years of public ministry. But in that time he got a following by people who loved and laughed and partied and wept and suffered and lived life to the full. As a follower of that same Jesus, I don’t think anything has changed.

That is a serious point. One of the questions we are meant to ask when we read the Gospels is who were the people who responded positively to Jesus and who were those who were threatened by him and (ultimately) nailed him? And why? Read the texts and we find that the sort of people who were rejected by the religious establishment welcomed Jesus – maybe they had nothing to lose. But, given the reputation they helped Jesus get (“a glutton and a drunkard” who mixed with all the ‘wrong’ people), it is not surprising that these were the people who knew how to party.

One of the questions I frequently asked of clergy and PCCs was: When do you party? When do you celebrate God, his world and each other? One of the shocking things about visiting some of the poorest people in the world is that they know how to celebrate and laugh and share what they have – which is often time, themselves and the food they manage to get. No anxiety about protecting all their ‘stuff’. (Or queuing for two days to be the first to get the new iPad 2 from London’s Apple Store – when you could probably just walk in tomorrow and pick one up without any detrimental effect on life or limb…)

So, the ‘time’ thing is really just a way of suggesting that we get our lives and busyness into perspective. We aren’t here for long – better make the most of it. I don’t want to reach my death bed and state proudly that (a) I managed never to get tired or (b) at least the house and car were always clean.

PS. A friend once helpfully suggested that the way to remember which way the clocks go is this: they ‘spring’ forward and they ‘fall’ back (as in ‘autumn’). And that was fine until I realized that it is perfectly possible to spring backwards and fall forwards. So, I’m still confused. I think it’s forward and we lose an hour’s sleep tomorrow night.